System and method to implement a matrix multiply unit of a broadband processor

ABSTRACT

A system and a method are configured to improve the performance of general-purpose processors by implementing a functional unit that computes the product of a matrix operand with a vector operand, producing a vector result. The functional unit fully utilizes the entire resources of a 128 b by 128 b multiplier regardless of the operand size, as the number of elements of the matrix and vector operands increase as operand size is reduced. The unit performs both fixed-point and floating-point multiplications and additions with the highest-possible intermediate accuracy with modest resources.

RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a Continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 12/330,962, filed Dec. 9, 2008 now U.S. Pat. No. 8,195,735, which is a Divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/233,779, filed Sep. 4, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,483,935, claiming the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/317,427, filed Sep. 4, 2001, the entire contents of each of which are hereby incorporated by reference.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to matrix multiply units. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method to implement a matrix multiply unit of a broadband processor.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Recent multimedia CPUs operate in parallel on 128 b vectors, partitioned into 8-16 b elements. Exemplars of these designs are described in Craig Hansen. MicroUnity's MediaProcessor Architecture. IEEE Micro, 16(4):34-41, August 1996, and Keith Diefendorff. Pentium III=Pentium II+SSE. Microprocessor Report, 13(3):1, 6-11, March 1999. These designs perform arithmetic operations on values partitioned into vectors, such as addition and multiplication. The operations are performed by functional units in which the hardware employed to perform the operation, an adder for an add operation, or a multiplier for a multiply operation is in turn partitioned so as to perform vector operations of the specified element size. Vector adds need only AND carries between elements, but vector multiplies idle all but a single stripe one element wide through the product array. Thus, a 128 b×128 b multiplier, when performing a vector multiplication on 8 b operands, only employs the resources of an 8 b×128 b multiplier, leaving resources of the size of a 120 b×128 b multiplier idle, or performing a mathematically trivial operation, such as multiplication by zero.

As the hardware resources for a multiplier capable of performing a 128 b×128 b are considerably larger than that of a 128 b+128 b adder, the lower utilization of the multiplier when performing vector multiplications of a smaller element size is of considerable concern in designing an efficient processor. While one approach to designing an efficient multiplier is to limit the size of the multiplier to a smaller strip which can perform vector multiplications only of small elements in a single pipeline flow, the present invention instead aims to make efficient use of a large 128 b×128 b multiplier array pipeline by performing a vector-matrix product.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

A vector-matrix multiplier unit fully utilizes a 128×128 b data path for operand sizes from 8 to 128 b and operand types including signed, unsigned or complex, and fixed-, floating-point, polynomial, or Galois-field while maintaining full internal precision.

The present invention may include a method of performing multiplication with integrated polynomial multiplication capability comprising the steps of: receiving the multiplier operand, the multiplicand operand, and the polynomial specification signal; calculating a product, the product being one of an integer product or a polynomial product, depending on the polynomial specification signal; and transmitting the result.

In accordance with a method of the present invention, the step of calculating the product may include producing partial products and calculating one of an integer product or polynomial product based on the partial products, and wherein the step of producing the partial product may modify a calculation of x1, x2 and negate selection signals using an enhanced Booth encoder, depending on the polynomial specification signal.

The method of the present invention may further comprise the steps of calculating x1, x2 and negate selection signals and recoding the x1, x2 and negate selection signals into x1pass, x1force, x2pass, x2force signals; combining x1pass, x1force, x2pass, x2force signals with multiplicand x1 and multiplicand x2 signals producing a partial product; and inhibiting the value of the x1force, x2pass and x2force signals at certain multiplexor locations to produce an alternate partial product.

The method of the present invention, wherein the step of calculating the product may include producing partial products, and may further include the step of adding partial products in a partial products summation tree, in which the carry output of each full adder is inhibited to perform polynomial multiplication, depending on the polynomial specification signal.

The present invention may further include a method of performing matrix multiplication with partitioning capability comprising the steps of: receiving a multiplier operand, a multiplicand operand, and a partitioning specification signal; calculating partitioned product, depending on a partitioning specification signal; and transmitting the calculated partitioned product.

The method of the present invention, wherein the step of calculating a partitioned product may further comprise the step of producing a carry-save result with no additions for the least significant four bits of an 8 b partial product

In accordance with the method of the present invention, the step of calculating a partitioned product may further comprise the step of obtaining a partial product computation in which separate head and tail bits are produced at a partition boundary between operands, or fused together into a single 8 b partial product.

The present invention may comprise a system of performing multiplication with integrated polynomial multiplication capability comprising: a receiver which receive a multiplier operand, a multiplicand operand, and a polynomial specification signal; a multiplier that calculates an integer product or polynomial product, depending on a polynomial specification signal; and a transmitter that transmits one of the integer product or the polynomial product calculated by the calculator.

In the system of the present invention, the multiplier may include a portion which produces partial products and a portion which calculates one of an integer product or polynomial product based on the partial products, and wherein the portion that produces partial products may include an enhanced Booth encoder that modifies a calculation of x1, x2 and negate selection signals, depending on the polynomial specification signal.

The present invention may further include a system of performing matrix multiplication with partitioning capability comprising: a receiver which receives a multiplier operand, a multiplicand operand, and a partitioning specification signal; a multiplier that computes partitioned product results, depending on a partitioning specification signal; and a transmitter which transmits the partitioned product results computed by the multiplier.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The accompanying drawings, which are incorporated in and form a part of the specification, serve to explain exemplary principles of the invention. In the drawings:

FIG. 1 illustrates a convolve operation in accordance with the present invention versus prior art.

FIG. 2 illustrates a vector-matrix multiplier block diagram, in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 3 illustrates enhanced Booth encoder and multiplexor circuits in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 4 illustrates a partitionable byte multiplier, in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 5 illustrates an align-reduce block, in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 6 illustrates details of a byte multiplier partition boundary, in accordance with the present invention.

FIG. 7 illustrates enhanced Booth multiplexor logic function, in accordance with the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

The exemplary implementation is intended to integrate the greatest possible range of function into a generalized multiplier. The first goal was to handle all of the following operand formats:

-   -   8 b, 16 b, 32 b, 64 b, 128 b integer (un)signed         multiplier×(un)signed multiplicand     -   8 b, 16 b, 32 b, 64 b, complex integer         -   16 b, 32 b, 64 b, 128 b floating-point         -   16 b, 32 b, 64 b complex floating-point     -   8 b, 16 b, 32 b, 64 b, 128 b polynomial     -   8 b Galois-field.

The second goal was to provide all functions on these data types within reach of a generalized 128×128 b multiplier, including:

wmulmat (wide) matrix multiply econ convolve emuladd multiply add (two vectors element-wise, add to third) emulsum multiply sum (dot product) emul multiply (two vectors element-wise) escaladd scale add (linear combination of two vectors)

In a 128 b×128 b vector-matrix product, one operand is a 128 b vector, consisting of 128b/size elements of the specified size, and the other operand is a matrix of 128 b/size by 128 b/size elements. The vector-matrix product is formed by summing the products of the vector operand with 128/size vector “slices” of the matrix operand, producing a 128 b vector result. As a product generally has a representation that is twice the size of equal-sized operands, and the representation of a addition has one more bit than the size of equal-sized operands, the sum of the products is larger than the operands, and the representation of the result is compressed by extracting a subset of the bits of the result, and rounding the subset to reflect less-significant bits removed from the result.

The summation of products and partial products in vector-matrix multiplication uses a technique called carry-save addition, in which these products are represented in a form that uses greater than the minimum representable bits, so that carries do not need to propagate from one end of the operand to the other in an addition operation. Commonly, the representation doubles the number of bits, so that carries need not propagate at all, but are saved for a later stage. Thus, an adder that sums two such redundant values receives four bits and produces two bits per non-redundant bit position and is named a 4:2 adder. Other common forms of carry-save adders are 3:2 adders (full adders), which have well-known hardware representation, and are building blocks for 4:2 and 5:2 adders.

Media and signal-processing applications perform conventional arithmetic processing, but may also involve dealing with error-correction, in which rounded results do not have appropriate numerical properties, but an alternate arithmetic forms, known as polynomial, finite-field, and Galois-field arithmetic do. A fundamental component of these alternate forms are polynomial arithmetic, which is much like conventional unsigned arithmetic processing except that all carries are suppressed. It is a goal of the present invention to perform polynomial multiplication as well as conventional multiplication using an integrated design. The present invention combines these two capabilities together to reduce the amount of hardware that would otherwise be required to provide these capabilities in separate hardware.

Floating-point formats combine sign, exponent and significand information into a single operand, producing a representation that greatly expands the range of values that the operand can signify. The representation of a result need not be larger than that of the operands, as the exponent allows for a large range, and the significand can be normalized and rounded, so as to produce the closest representable value to the ideal result. The present invention, because the vector-matrix product sums several scalar products together before scaling and rounding the result, can produce results that are more precise than prior art designs.

Matrices are too wide to fit into a register operand—e.g. 8 b matrix has 16×16=256 elements, equivalent to 16 128 b registers. An SRAM array of eight 2048 b entries is embedded in the multiplier to hold the most recently used matrices. The mechanisms employed in the present invention for providing the wide operand are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,295,599, “System and method for providing a wide operand architecture.” The mechanisms for addressing and filling this embedded matrix cache are identical to the ones used for switch and table caches in the companion Crossbar and Table Lookup units, so much of the infrastructure can be shared. DSP and multimedia code often multiplies one or two matrices many times by a long sequence of vectors. Examples include 4×4 floating-point graphical transform, discrete cosine transform, Reed-Solomon error correction, and AES (Rijndael) encryption.

Fortunately, matrices that change rapidly are often redundant enough to be specified by few registers. For example, the convolve operation is multiplication by a matrix that can be constructed by the Multiplicand Multiplexor from two register operations, as explained below. The Multiplicand Multiplexor also assists the vector operations emuladd, emulsum, escaladd above by forming matrices with one or two non-zero stripes.

The third goal was to perform internal calculations without loss of data—that is, as if intermediate values were computed with unlimited precision. For integer operations, this means that products are computed with double the initial operand width and careful sign extension, and that sums of products keep track of sign and overflow bits that increase in each adder stage.

For floating point operations, one approach would be to convert to integer and then follow the integer discipline, but hardware cost is prohibitive. A more sophisticated strategy is to design each stage of the shift/add tree to forward exactly the results needed to the next stage, but defer the transistor cost of full width to the latest possible stage, as is described in below.

Integrated matrix operations and fully precise processing are a surprisingly compatible and economic mix. The internal accumulations have latency that is independent of width, since they are done in redundant form, and the full width in the last stage is amortized over many fused operations. Using a simple full-width integer verification model as the gold standard of correctness eases logic testing of the hardware.

The fourth goal was to support the full range of mathematical techniques for optimizing accuracy of conversion to each of the above (limited precision) operand formats. These include rounding, saturation, scaling, field extraction, conversions, overflow and other exceptions, NANs, denormalized numbers, etc. These refinements simplify the development of software that complies with standards for algorithms such as MPEG-4 and broadband modems.

FIG. 1 shows the benefit of harnessing an entire 128×128 b array as a 16 b integer convolve instruction, useful for filtering and correlation. A vector of 8 16 b coefficients multiplies an 8×8 matrix constructed by sliding a window one element at a time through 256 b of data samples. A total of 58 MMX instructions perform a similar convolve, with loss of data through overflow.

FIG. 2 is a block diagram of the proposed vector-matrix multiplier. This design performs on many mathematical types: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8 b signed and unsigned integers and polynomials, Galois fields, 128, 64, 32 b IEEE-754 standard [ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic, IEEE, 1985] (and an IEEE-754-like 16 b) floating-point—with rounding, saturation, complex numbers, exceptions, denormalized numbers, NANs, etc. The unit also computes sums of products without loss of precision.

At the top of FIG. 2 is a memory for eight entries of 16×128 b=2048 b, which acts as an matrix multiplicand cache e.g. for DCT, graphical transforms, Rijndael or Reed-Solomon syndromes. A matrix operand may also be dynamically constructed from two 128 b register operands. The multiplier vector is supplied by a third 128 b register operand. Formatters mask exponents and insert hidden bits to convert floating point to integer.

16 parallel ByteMul blocks 201/202 multiply 8 b Booth-encoded multipliers with 128 b multiplicand vectors and produce 128 b partitioned carry-save product strips. These strips are then combined in a 4-stage binary tree of alignment multiplexors 203, 205, 206, 208, 210 and 4:2 adders 204, 207, 209, 211 to reach the full 128 b sum of products.

The Doublet Multiplexor 203 aligns byte product strips that are then added into doublet strips comprising 16 b partial products. Each floating-point format contains enough exponent bits to allow left shifting significand products up to 7 b without overflow, aligning to 8 b granularity with the Bit Align Multiplexor 205. Later multiplexors 206, 208, 210, are therefore 8 b-granular and require no more than 8 inputs. The Quadlet Multiplexor 206 aligns all strips to 32 b boundaries, so no further horizontal shifting of products occur, except for a small fraction of signals that shift by 32, 64 b at the 64 b or 128 b stages. This reduces the number of multiplexor inputs required in the next stage, the Octlet Multiplexor 208. The Octlet multiplexor 208 aligns all strips to 64 b boundaries, reducing the number of multiplexor inputs required in the final summation stage, the Hexlet Multiplexor 210. The result of the final 4:2 addition 211 is then accumulated, the leading zero location is anticipated, and a final carry-propagation addition and rounding is performed by block 212. The Multiplexor Control and FP exponent path 213 computes control signals for the Multiplexors, dependent on the values of floating-point exponents, where present, and the specified size of the operands.

The Multiplicand Format block 216 selects either a wide operand from the Wide Operand Memory 215, or a Multiplicand constructed by (possibly redundant) selections from the Multiplicand Mux 214. The Multiplicand Format block 216 produces multiplicands for each ByteMul block 201/202, with circuits located as closely as possible to the ByteMul blocks to minimize the total amount of wiring.

FIG. 3 shows the detail of enhanced Booth encode and multiply circuits. The prior art conventional Booth Multiply 301 in the center selects ±2, ±1,0 multiplicand using signals encoded from a 3 b window of the multiplier. The 3 b window is shown in FIG. 3 as mplier <I−1> 310, mplier <I> 311, and mplier <I+1> 312. Polynomial and Galois multiplications require the generation of the XOR of the multiplicand x1 and the multiplicand x2 when two adjacent multiplier bits are set, which is a result that the conventional Booth Multiplier in prior art cannot generate. The enhanced Booth Multiply 302 shown on the right has the same multiplicand delay as conventional, but permits a sixth result: the XOR of two neighboring bits for polynomial and Galois multiplies. The enhanced Booth Encoder 303 performs a normal Booth encoding step, selecting the multiplicand x1, or the multiplicand x2, and negate selections according to normal Booth encoding rules, but when the polynomial signal is active, modifies these results to select multiplicand x1 and mutiplicand x2 from multiplier bits <I> and <I+1>, in conjunction with the recoder block 304. The control signals for the enhanced Booth Encoder are designated x1pass 313, x1force 314, x2pass 315, and x2force 316. The x1 pass and x1force signals cause the multiplicand x1 signal to be modified to the fixed values 0 or 1, and the x2pass and x2force signals cause the multiplicand x2 signal to be modified to the fixed values 0 or 1. The combination of these modified values with an XOR gate provides the partial product result. The delay of the shaded gates added to enable polynomial and complex (negated) products balances the multiplier path with multiplicand delay. Fusing gates 305 inhibit a subset of the booth multiply selection controls for bits at or near the boundary between two multiplicand operands, to compute two distinct partial product values at this boundary.

In FIG. 4, prior art conventional product bits 401 required for an 8×8 signed/unsigned Booth multiplier are shown. Normal partial product bits pp are shown as dots, and special values required at the most significant end of the product are shown as m, s or ˜s. Carry input bits c0 are shown for partial product values which have been negated by the Booth encoding. The hollow dot values designate a simple partial product value required for computing the unsigned product in that the 3 b field has two zero bits appended, so that only the multiplicand x1 or zero need to be selected. The partial product values are summed in a carry-save adder by summing bits in vertical columns.

The present design product bits 402 rearranges carry-input bits for negated partial products (pp) to produce the lower 4 b of carry-save results with no addition, and rearranges sign-extension bits to partition the multiplier at byte boundaries. Special partial product values PPR and PPL are computed at the locations designated r and l in the product bits 402. The lower half of the partial product bits are shaded and designated as head partial product bits, the upper half of the partial product bits are designated as tail partial product bits.

The present design product bits 403 are further rearranged into rectangular layout with the byte boundary partitioned along the diagonal by 2:1 multiplexors 410 and 411. Here the head partial product bits of one operand are shown adjacent to the tail partial product bits of an adjacent operand. Depending on whether these operands are to be fused together, either a single fused result is generated, or separate head and tail results are generated, using the 2:1 multiplexors 410 and 411. The partial products are summed using full adders designated FA for the head bits 412 and tail bits 413.

In order to compute polynomial or Galois products, the full adders in FIGS. 4 and 5 perform either the normal 3:2 carry-save addition, or by assertion of a ˜polynomial signal, not otherwise shown in the diagram, inhibit the carry signal altogether. The inhibition of the carry signal cause the summation of the partial products to proceed in the fashion required for a polynomial multiplication. It can be noted that certain of the full adders, including all those in FIG. 5, have at least one input which comes from the carry output of another full adder, or an input that comes from a partial product which will be known to have zero value during polynomial multiplication. Such full adders can inhibit carry propagation only from the inputs which are may be non-zero during polynomial multiplication, saving a small amount of power and area of the logic.

Fusing Gates 305 in the PPL and PPR boxes in FIG. 3 modify the control of just the two lower pp generators to absorb the XORs of carry ripple. The 8 b ByteMul unit repeats in a 16×17 array.

FIG. 5 shows a representative byte-granular adder stage, combining a clocked multiplexor to select and align operands, a byte-wide 4-2 compressor, or carry-save adder, and a carry-input multiplexor to handle the variety of carry connections. This block repeats in two successive adder stages, producing a dense 16×18 array. It can be appreciated that the clocked multiplexor, because it is clocked, limits the transfer of data at clock boundaries in order to perform matrix multiplications in a pipelined fashion; many matrix multiplications may be calculated at once. The clocked nature also serves to limit the propagation of signals so as to reduce power consumption. However, the location of the clocking can be adjusted numerous ways without changing the nature of the design, such as by using unclocked multiplexors, or even by using clocked 4-2 compressors. This block comprises the data path components of the Doublet, Quadlet, Octlet and Hexlet mux/adder stages 203-204, 206-211.

The number of full adders listed in the first three stages of FIG. 2 is equal to that needed for integer operations. When two floating-point products are added together, the product with a lesser exponent is “sign extended” with bytes that have the sum and carry bits set to one and zero respectively, and added to the product with the greater exponent. Bytes of the lesser-exponent product are passed to the next stage without addition, as the matching bytes of the other product are zero.

A key feature of the reduction (addition) stages is that the products are aligned with respect to a common reference point, so that values that need to be added are therefore equally aligned. This reduces the complexity of forming a sum of floating-point products considerably, as the partial products can be independently aligned. Prior art multiply-add units aligned the addend to the product, but this method would create great complexity in computing the sum of two, four, or eight products as in the present invention.

Further, the reduction stages progressively align the products and partial products as the values propagate through the reduction, which reduces the number of inputs on the multiplexors required to align the operands. The present invention first aligns 16 b partial products to 8 b alignment, where 8 b alignment signifies that the shifting is by zero to seven bits, so that further alignment shifting will be by multiplies of eight bits. This initial alignment takes advantage of excess precision available in the 16 b partial product representation to avoid the need to extend the partial product size, made available by the observation that floating-point formats, by devoting a portion of the representation to sign and exponent, leave sufficient zero space in the multiplier and multiplicand to assure seven bits of zeroes in the 16 b partial product. Further alignments to 32 b alignment preceed the accumulation of 32 b partial products, and 64 b preceeds the 64 b partial product accumulation, and 128 b preceeds the 128 b partial product accumulation. Overaligning products increases the effective size of the partial results, while underaligning products increases the number of multiplexor inputs at a reduction stage. Thus, the amount of alignment is selected to minimize the amount of hardware.

When two floating-point products are added with exponents that are far enough apart that the products do not overlap or meet at a byte boundary, a pair of carry-save results are generated, with the implicit assumption that intervening bytes will consist of “sign extension” bytes that have the sum and carry bits set to one and zero respectively. In this way, the number of bits needed to represent the sum of two floating-point products is no greater than that of the products themselves.

When four floating-point products are added, however, the sign-extended least product may need to be added to all three greater products. To preserve accuracy in 64 b and 128 b stages, the number of full adders per bit is triple the integer amount—24 and 12 instead of 8 and 4. For 16 b floating-point matrix multiplication, the 64 b and 128 b reduce stages actually sums eight 16 b products without loss, because the 96 b width provides overflow margin for the 88 b full integer width of these products. Thus, in the latter stages, the 16 b floating-point products are converted to fixed-point by aligning the results by the exponent sum.

The Byte Multiplier strip is key to the partitioning of the vector-matrix array. The design evolved through a few stages. A prior art approach was to compute an array of byte products, and then combine them in a doubling tree. At each stage three of the four products overlap, so a 6:2 redundant adder is needed.

For this reason we designed the Byte multiply stage to compute “strips” of products. For example, if the multiplicands are 16 b each, the fuse multiplexors in FIG. 4 will alternately partition and fuse successive bytes. The Doublet Multiplexor in FIG. 2 assembles 24 b strips of 8×16 b sub-products by selecting the “head” byte at the lsb end and “tail” bytes at the two other byte positions. The multiplexor also handles sign extension. The 32 b product is then computed in Doubadd with a 4:2 redundant adder. Similarly, n bit multiplicands result in n strips of n+8 bits (plus sign extension), each shifted 8 b relative to the last and combined in a 4:2 binary tree that has the same depth as a conventional non-partitioned multiplier.

Each 8 b unit in the Byte Multiplier strip really does a byte multiply add in the time of a multiply, by using slack at inputs in tail summation to add in the early head bits of the next byte. This extra work eliminates the need for a 6:2 adder at the next stage.

FIG. 6 shows in more detail the partition boundary between two Booth byte units that is sketched in FIG. 4. FIG. 6 illustrates the arrangement of partial product bits for two adjacent bytes. Where more than one bit is shown, the one bit or two bits are produced for the head partial product, and the other bit or two bits are produced for the tail partial product; when the partial products are fused, a single pp bit is computed as the partial product. The rearrangement in sign and carry positions has the effect of perfectly matching the resources of a 5:2 adder array; in that 5 partial products are produced when a single fused result is needed, and when two results are required, the 5:2 adder array can be partitioned as shown in FIG. 4 so as to produce both the head and tail results. When the operands are all the same size and the size is 2^(n)-bytes, the fuse bits at 2^(n)-byte element boundaries are identical, so the entire set is just a 4 b thermometer code.

Booth byte multiply was used in the exemplary embodiment, because 5:2 is the largest Wallace tree that degenerates to a serial array adder, simplifying the partition multiplexing of high order and sign bits. The enhanced Booth circuitry of FIG. 3 eliminates multiplexing the low order bits, because disabling the fuse signal automatically converts the two low order partial product bits ppr and ppl to the logic functions (after carry ripple) shown in detail in FIG. 7 (here p1,p2 and f1,f2 are the AND and OR control inputs to the AOI Booth Multiplexor respectively, or the signals x1pass, x2pass, x1force, x2force respectively).

Preservation of internal accuracy enables ideal signal-noise ratios, and is especially valuable in algorithms such as Newton-Raphson or sigma-delta sensitive to zero crossings. When large products cancel, two different addition orders may differ at every bit, so precision simplifies logic verification.

The effective internal bandwidth of a lossless matrix multiplier, as referred to conventional vector units, is very high. A 16×16 matrix at 8 b precision has 8+8+16 bits of multiply operands and 3×32 bits of add operands at each of 256 entries, or 32K bits total. That amounts to effective internal bandwidth of 12.8 Tbits at 400 MHz. 16 and 32 b lossless floating point is about the same bandwidth, because of the expansion of adder width. The wire counts between stages in FIG. 2 show how this design defers the full bandwidth cost until the late adder stages.

The exemplary embodiment demonstrates that the functional goals of the vector-matrix multiplier could be met with remarkably little logical overhead relative to more conventional multi-precision multipliers: the number of 4:2 stages is the same, the byte multiplicand delay is increased by a single 2:1 multiplexor, the Multiplicand Multiplexor is overlapped with Booth encode. The additional width of full internal precision is deferred to later stages.

Although the invention herein has been described as primarily a hardware implementation for illustration purposes, those of skill will recognize that the invention may be performed by one or more computational devices which capable of performing the calculation of the disclosed hardware devices. Moreover one of skill will recognize that the method of the present invention may encoded or embodied in software programs that may be carried on a recordable medium including digital recording medium such as an optical disc (such as a CD or DVD), magnetic disk or tape, and may be transmitted by a wireline or wireless communications devices in packetized or non-packetized form.

Having fully described a preferred embodiment of the invention and various alternatives, those skilled in the art will recognize, given the teachings herein, that numerous alternatives and equivalents exist which do not depart from the invention. It is therefore intended that the invention not be limited by the foregoing description, but only by the appended claims. 

We claim:
 1. A system for multiplying matrix multiplicand data by vector multiplier data, the system comprising: a memory for storing the matrix multiplicand data and a register for storing the vector multiplier data, the matrix multiplicand data having a bit width wider than the vector multiplier data; a multiplier formatter coupled to the memory for receiving the vector multiplier data and partitioning it into a plurality of vector data elements; a multiplicand formatter coupled to the memory for receiving the matrix multiplicand data and partitioning it into a plurality of matrix multiplicands; a group of multiplier strips producing partial products; a group of alignment stages, each stage including a bit-aligning multiplexer; a group of reduction stages; a final carry propagation stage for providing a result of multiplication of the matrix multiplicand data by the vector multiplier data; and wherein: the matrix multiplicand data and the vector multiplier data include floating point data having exponents and significand fields; and each reduction stage aligns n-bit partial products to 2n-bit alignment thereby producing 2n-bit aligned partial products before adding the 2n-bit aligned partial products to produce a 2n-bit partial product.
 2. The system of claim 1, wherein the multiplier formatter and the multiplicand formatter mask exponents of floating point data.
 3. The system of claim 2, further comprising a controller coupled to all of the bit-aligning multiplexers.
 4. The system of claim 3, wherein the exponents of the floating point data are provided to the controller and the significand fields are provided to the group of multiplier strips.
 5. The system of claim 1, further comprising a plurality of Booth encoders coupled between the multiplier formatter and the group of multiplier strips.
 6. The system of claim 1, wherein the multiplier strips perform a partial product computation that produces a carry save result with no additions for the least significant four bits of an 8-bit partial product.
 7. The system of claim 1, wherein the multiplier strips perform a partial product computation in which separate head and tail bits produced at a boundary between operands are catenated together into a single partial product.
 8. The system of claim 1, wherein the multiplier adds 8-bit partial products to produce a 16-bit partial product.
 9. The system of claim 1, wherein each of the alignment stages aligns 16-bit partial products to 8-bit and aligns each of the 16-bit partial products to a common reference point.
 10. The system of claim 9, wherein one of the reduction stages aligns the 16-bit partial products to 32-bit alignment thereby producing 32-bit aligned partial products before adding the 32-bit aligned partial products to produce a 32-bit partial product.
 11. The system of claim 10, wherein the reduction stage that aligns 16-bit partial products to 32-bit alignment aligns each of the 16-bit partial products to a common reference point.
 12. The system of claim 10, wherein one of the reduction stages further aligns 32-bit partial products to 64-bit alignment, thereby producing 64-bit aligned partial products before adding the 64-bit aligned partial products to produce a 64-bit partial product.
 13. The system of claim 12, wherein the reduction stage that aligns 32-bit partial products to 64-bit alignment aligns each of the 32-bit partial products to a common reference point.
 14. The system of claim 12, wherein one of the reduction stages further aligns 64-bit partial products to 128-bit alignment, thereby producing 128-bit aligned partial products before adding the 128-bit aligned partial products to produce a 128-bit partial product.
 15. The system of claim 14, wherein the reduction stage that aligns 64-bit partial products to 128-bit alignment aligns each of the 64-bit partial products to a common reference point.
 16. In a multiplier unit of a processor a method for multiplying matrix multiplicand data by vector multiplier data, each of the matrix multiplicand data and the vector multiplier data including floating point data having exponents and significand fields, the method comprising: receiving the vector multiplier data and partitioning it into a plurality of vector data elements; receiving the matrix multiplicand data and partitioning it into a plurality of matrix multiplicands, the matrix multiplicand data having a bit width wider than that of the vector multiplier data; masking exponents of floating point data to exclude the exponents from the vector data elements and from the matrix multiplicand data; multiplying the vector data elements and the matrix multiplicands to produce n-bit partial products; aligning the n-bit partial products to 2n-bit alignment thereby producing 2n-bit aligned partial products; adding the 2n-bit aligned partial products to produce a 2n-bit partial product; and performing a carry propagation operation on the 2n-bit partial products to produce a result of multiplication of the matrix multiplicand data by the vector multiplier data.
 17. The method of claim 16, further comprising providing the exponents of floating point data to the result of multiplication of the matrix multiplicand data by the vector multiplier data.
 18. The method of claim 16, further comprising before the step of multiplying, performing a step of Booth encoding the vector data elements and the matrix multiplicands.
 19. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of multiplying adds 8-bit partial products to produce 16-bit partial products.
 20. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of aligning comprises aligning 16-bit partial products to 8-bit alignment by aligning each of the 16-bit partial products to a common reference point.
 21. The method of claim 20, wherein the step of aligning further comprises aligning the 16-bit partial products to 32-bit alignment by aligning each of the 16-bit partial products to a common reference point, thereby producing 32-bit aligned partial products.
 22. The method of claim 21, wherein the step of adding comprises adding the 32-bit aligned partial products to produce a 32-bit partial product.
 23. The method of claim 22, wherein the step of aligning further comprises aligning 32-bit partial products to 64-bit alignment by aligning each of the 32-bit partial products to a common reference point, thereby producing 64-bit aligned partial products.
 24. The method of claim 23, wherein the step of adding further comprises adding the 64-bit aligned partial products to produce a 64-bit partial product.
 25. The method of claim 24, wherein the step of aligning further comprises aligning 64-bit partial products to 128-bit alignment by aligning each of the 64-bit partial products to a common reference point, thereby producing 128-bit aligned partial products.
 26. The method of claim 25, wherein the step of adding further comprises adding the 128-bit aligned partial products to produce a 128-bit partial product. 